Stop.
These two albums are like nothing else you’ve heard.
They are overflowing with poetry and pathological stuttering.
They are laden with natural speech rhythms and melodies, intuitively blurted by some of L.A.’s avant-jazz heavyweights.
They are the sound of the 21st century finally breaking its leash. They were made by someone named Mooey Moobau, whose real name is Joseph Tepperman.
He has a day job doing experiments on speech.
He once published a serious research paper about automatic sarcasm detection.
He hears abstract sequences of phonetic sounds come to him like whispers from Old English spirits.
He sings his live shows to these sounds as he realtime cassette edits them, rocking the pause button.
He also plays trombone like Eric Dolphy played clarinet: verbally.
He’s done this verbose tromboning with lots of different people from L.A. – most often Killsonic.
And it is mostly Killsonic who back up Mooey Moobau’s jagged live shows.
And it was also mostly they who accompanied him on his first album.
And All Murmur Of Our Mothers’ Waters is the title of that album.
And that title refers to the place we are in before we are born, insofar as it is a place.
It came out in 2008, and is included here as Disc 1.
Live Bloody Live is its companion piece, Disc 2.
It is a live album among live albums, and it is not really a live album at all.
It was recorded all over Los Angeles over 2 years, at 12 venues on 16 dates, with 19 musicians.
It sounds like violas.
Like violas that bleed all over pianos.
Like bloodied pianos that, with their many keys, aren’t too different from sputtering computers.
Like computers that sputter and bubble until they start to sound like a gang of epileptic drummers.
Like epileptic drummers who exhaust themselves trying to breathe under layers and layers of applause.
It is as ambitious as it is disorienting.
It is a document of a truly shameless performer.
It is what you have been missing, whether you’ve seen Mooey Moobau live or not.